Facebook teams with Omniture for ad buying and analytics

The tie-up builds on Omniture’s SearchCenter Plus, adding new functionality for purchasing Facebook Ads to the search engine marketing management application. In this way, Omniture says customers can now more easily compare Facebook ad campaign metrics alongside other media channels.

On top of this, Omniture says it has introduced the ability for customers to generate reports specific to understanding the ad effectiveness of Facebook elements, such as company pages and applications. The firm first introduced app measurement capabilities in May last year.

The news comes as Omniture’s web analytics rival WebTrends launches its own Facebook measurement capabilities, covering Facebook Fan page activity, applications, page tabs, and ad click performance.

• Also today, Omniture announced a deal with WPP-owned web measurement firm Compete to integrate the latter’s competitive intelligence data with the former’s web analytics data. Customers of both companies will get access to an integrated dashboard to allow them to compare the performance of their website against those of their rivals.